Reading the Booker Longlist - Audition, Katie Kitamura
Sometimes it's hard to know how to talk about a book, or even how to respond to it at all. For me, Audition is one of those books.
I'm usually a fan of books that play with ambiguity, and that leave you with more questions than answers, but in this case the questions it left me with were questions like, "what was the point of that?"
It's quite frustrating, because for the first half of the novel I was really enjoying things and interested to see where we were going. The narrator was interesting, I loved the prose, and the web of relationships that we were building up was fascinating. And then the break between parts occurs, and we enter the second half of the book, and it felt like we simply threw out everything from the first half.
Largely I think I just didn't understand what Kitamura was aiming for with this. On the surface the thesis is pretty plain - it's stated outright a number of times, after all. We're concerned here with duality of personhood, of how we play different roles depending on who we're performing for, and how it's in the gaps between those roles or between the acts or between phases of life or &c. in which we find out what's true and who we are. And there's a big, gaping hole in the middle of this book between parts 1 and 2, in which something happens that we can't possibly understand that changes everything we know to be true. But this isn't metaphorical, this is a real change; the characters we're reading about in part 1 may share names and occupations with the characters in part 2 but unless the narrator is entirely misleading us in one or both of those parts, they are not in fact the same characters. And so this then leaves us with two questions: if one of the narrators is lying to us, then to what end? And if they're actually different characters, then what point are we meant to glean from all of this?
And ultimately, I can't find a satisfactory answer to either of those questions. The shift between the two parts is so sudden and so jarring that I spent the back half of the book desperately looking for clues to make sense of it, and I found nothing. Perhaps I'm not looking hard enough, or perhaps I'm reading things too literally that aren't meant to be read literally. Whatever is happening, whatever the Booker committee saw in this, I simply don't get it.
That's not to say that I didn't like the book or enjoy reading it. I did. Which makes the fact that I didn't understand it more frustrating. And perhaps that's a me problem, which is fine. But it's definitely a problem.